Botched Spider Web Takes Starring Role in ‘Spider-Man’ Battle

Director Julie Taymor traces her
March 2011 dismissal from “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” to a
giant, disobedient spider web briefly parked high above the
seats inside Broadway’s Foxwoods Theatre.

The $1 million prop for the $75 million musical was
intended “to descend from the ceiling of the theater in a
thrilling flight/fly sequence” at the end of the show, she said
in a filing March 2 in federal court in Manhattan.

Instead, the “coup de theatre” was improperly designed by
a team led by set designer George Tsypin, she said in court
papers.

The malfunctioning web interfered with the rigging
necessary to fly the cast through the auditorium and was removed
the day it was installed, Taymor said.

Tsypin later told the producers that cuts to the second act
suggested by Taymor’s co-writer, Glen Berger, were “our only
chance to save the show,” according to court papers.

She said in her filing that a streamlined story “appears
to have been conceived as a way to avoid the technical
challenges Tsypin and his team were having with staging the
finale” that she envisioned.

Broadway’s tastiest backstage drama is playing out in court
papers ahead of a scheduled trial in January 2013.

Countersuit

Taymor claimed in a Nov. 8 lawsuit that producers violated
her intellectual-property rights by making changes without her
permission and didn’t pay royalties due her as a co-book writer.

In their January countersuit, the producers accused her of
refusing to make changes and storming out of meetings when
alterations were even hinted at. They say they salvaged the show
by “their superhuman efforts to save the musical, including
raising tens of millions of dollars -- much of it their own --
to fund the ever-increasing costs of the production.”

Rick Miramontez, a spokesman for the production and lead
producers Michael Cohl and Jeremiah Harris, said yesterday that
Cohl wasn’t available. Harris declined to comment. Chris
Kanarick, a spokesman for Taymor, said she wasn’t available. A
representative for Tsypin, who has designed operas worldwide,
referred inquiries to Miramontez.

Taymor’s filing said producers made her a scapegoat to
appease anxious investors. It cites an e-mail from Cohl, a
Canadian concert promoter, boasting that with Taymor dismissed
he was “confident we can raise” new capital.

Duplicitous Bono

Taymor portrays her onetime collaborators, including Bono
and the Edge of U2, as duplicitous and inept. She said she
repeatedly urged Cohl to address the spider web.

“I think we need to get into the reality of the
problematic giant web/ring as soon as possible,” she wrote to
Cohl in early September 2010, more than two months before
previews began, according to court papers.

“There may be a certain amount of denial going on and
postponing a radical solution is not good.”

Taymor blamed the web failure for why early previews had an
anticlimactic ending.

In describing the response to “Spider-Man,” Taymor’s
filing quotes selectively from reviews published in early 2011
before she was fired.

She quotes John Lahr in the New Yorker, who wrote that her
staging is “bold, elegant and eloquent.” She omits his
reference to “narrative impoverishment” and that “everything
happening behind the actors is brilliant and everything
happening between them is banal.”

The case is Julie Taymor v. 8 Legged Productions LLC,
1:11-cv-08002-RJH, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New
York (Manhattan).